Starring Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway. Rated PG. Now playing.

As a veteran writer-director, Nancy Meyers has displayed neither verbal wit nor visual flair. But her films—exemplified by blandly interchangeable titles like What Women Want, Something’s Gotta Give, and It’s Complicated—have managed to capture something current in the male-female zeitgeist.

The Intern again speaks to the moment, at least for white, upper-middle-class hipsters and forebears untroubled by actual real-estate prices. The main venue here is a Brooklyn factory converted into a wall-free loft for the internet fashion start-up run by Anne Hathaway’s convincingly ambitious Jules Ostin. The name sounds androgynous, but the situation is straight-up can-she-really-have-it-all? Her 200 employees just love Jules’s inability to delegate, remember appointments, or clean up her own desk. She doesn’t sleep or eat properly, and rarely sees her stay-at-home husband (the charisma-free Anders Holm) and adorable daughter (JoJo Kushner) at their perfect brownstone. Sounds like somebody needs a damn intern.

A new seniors-outreach trend has supplanted the man-bun, so that’s how our harried heroine ends up with 70-year-old Ben Whittaker, a retired and recently widowed executive. This is Robert De Niro, deploying a relatively restrained version of the patented face-crumpling with which he denotes “comedy”. Turns out that this nattily suited and frighteningly punctual font of unpushy wisdom worked in the self-same factory, back when it churned out those quaint keepsakes called phone books.

Jules is ostentatiously rattled by his cool, history-rich efficacy, and the intergenerational intimacy his presence demands. For its first of two long hours, the film handles this low-key conflict blamelessly. But the moment she realizes that Ben’s the coolest thing since Frank Sinatra, the movie falls apart. Suddenly, Meyers sends Mr. Suit and his casual-Friday work buddies on a heist, and I’m not kidding. Subsequently, it’s one random thing after another, with Ben providing exactly the right solution to every problem—including the apparent needs of the almost-age-appropriate in-house masseuse (a placid Rene Russo). No one pauses to question Ben’s own motivations in all of this. But why look beneath the surface when the mirror is so flattering?